Thinking In Pictures My Life With Autism Summary

In Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism, Grandin explains her incredible ability to engineer machinery, memorize volumes of information and provides a legacy in teaching a deeper understanding and appreciation of people that have ASD. However, it also doesn't go without explaining areas of functioning that have deficits and the discrimination that people with disabilities endure. Even today with ASD being more known, society may make many generalizations. A lot of people may envision people with autism as being mute, unresponsive or unreachable, and strange. People almost always only speak of autistic children and never that there are adults with the disorder in society. Another view is that of an autistic “savant” and that “they are a strange being with bizarre mannerisms and stereotypies, still cut off from normal life, but with uncanny powers of calculation, memory, drawing, whatever- like
She explained how one psychiatrist thought if he could find her “psychic injury” she could be cured.1 Also her high school psychologist wanted to stamp out her fixations on things like doors instead of trying to understand them and use them to stimulate learning. Grandin believes teachers need to help those with autism develop their talents and not place such an emphasis on deficits. Grandin also recounts her difficulties in school with forming relationships with her peers. The social interactions that may come naturally to most people can be extremely difficult for people with autism. She recalls how she was always observing and trying to find the best way to behave but still not fitting in. In her high school diary she wrote, “One should not always be a watcher- the cold impersonal observer- but instead should participate”.1 She always felt like someone who watches from the